You just can’t win with leftists. Here’s an example.
I’m reading a biography of famous Spanish writer Carmen Laforet who authored the second most widely read Spanish novel after Don Quixote.
Laforet’s future husband did everything a person humanly could to make her career as a writer possible. He found an opportunity for her to get her first publication, encouraged her to apply for a prestigious literary prize and even typed up the clean version of her first book so that she didn’t have to get distracted from her writing. He was a successful professional man and she an indigent, college student failing out of her second major. Yet he found the time and the willingness to put himself in service of her talent.
This was all happening in the 1940s, in Franco’s Spain during the autarky. Nobody much expected or wanted women to have careers. You’d think Laforet’s biographers would have something positive to say about the man who, in the most un-sexist way possible, advanced a woman’s career long before they got married and had a large number of children.
But no, the only scenario leftists can allow to exist is the one where an evil, oppressive husband steals his wife’s career and forces her to toil in obscurity, typing up his manuscripts as she swallows bitter tears of thwarted ambition. Instead of praising Laforet’s husband for helping her fulfill her dreams, they… rubbish the man for turning Laforet into a professional writer instead of letting her “live a life of complete freedom”. It’s unclear what kind of “freedom” the desperately poor Laforet could have achieved but who cares? As long as even the most helpful, supportive husband can be portrayed as an evil ogre, it’s all good.
Also, this idea of “complete freedom” as being preferable to a great husband, five children and a mega-successful literary career is pretty moronic. What does a person who’s “completely free” from all of this do all day? Stare at the wall, reciting leftist slogans?
The biography is good but the authors keep injecting their 21st-century activist hangups into the description of a life that existed in a completely different era and followed entirely different rules.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leftist ideal: interchangeable genderless marshmallows.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“the second most widely read Spanish novel after Don Quixote.”
Good Grief, that’s terrible. I read it just because I was told that I had to, but I really cannot see any literary merit in it. Drivel, basically. Maybe only interesting from a sociological point of view, but it’s not literature.
LikeLike
“I read it just because I was told that I had to, but I really cannot see any literary merit in it”
I wonder if it’s so widely read because it occupies a prominent place in beginning literature classes…. I don’t remember much of it beyond enjoying it (which was partly just enjoying that I could understand enough of it).
I have the idea it might be classified as YA today….
LikeLike
Something to do with female emancipation (not feminist, by the way) cautiously making its way through still conservative Francoist Spain, maybe?
People read a novel or a poem and say that it has touched them in a particular way because it has struck a chord with their sensibility: see, for example, the viral success of very forgettable reading matter like Eat, Pray, Love or A Little Life. That may all be very well from an emotional, social or psychological point of view, but literature is in the ‘how’, not in the ‘what’.
LikeLike